The first prisoner from Guantánamo Bay to face a civilian trial in the US arrived today in New York, where he is to be tried for his alleged role in the bombing of US embassies in east Africa.

Ahmed Ghailani landed in the city early this morning and was taken by military guards to Manhattan, where he is scheduled to appear in a federal court later today.

Indicted in 1998, Ghailani was described by Bush officials as a "high value detainee" after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004. He was transferred to the detention centre at the US naval base in Cuba two years later.

US officials say Ghailani began his terrorist career by delivering bomb parts on a bicycle and rose through the al-Qaida ranks to become a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden. Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was in his 20s when prosecutors say he helped build one of the bombs that destroyed US embassies in east Africa on August 1998.

Ghailani is charged with helping to buy a truck and oxygen and acetylene tanks used in the Tanzania bombing, and of loading boxes of TNT, detonators, and other equipment into the back of the truck in the weeks immediately before the bombing.

At a 2007 hearing at Guantanamo Bay to determine that he was an "enemy combatant," Ghailani confessed and apologized for supplying equipment used in the Tanzania bombing but said he did not know the supplies would be used to attack the embassy, according to military transcripts.

He told the Guantanamo review panel he bought the TNT used in the bombing, purchased a cell phone used by another person involved in the attack and was present when a third person bought a truck used in the attack, the transcript said.

Ghailani faces 286 counts, including charges of conspiring with Osama bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda to kill Americans anywhere in the world, and separate charges of murder for each of the 224 people killed in the bombings in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7, 1998.

The youngest detainee held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, seized when he was just 14 years old, has been released after seven years in captivity.
Mohammed El Gharani, a Chadian citizen, was set free five months after a U.S. federal judge ordered him released after reviewing the evidence against him and ruling that it did not prove he was ever an "enemy combatant."
Gharani was seized in Pakistani in 2001 when a mosque he was attending was raided by Pakistani security forces. He was ultimately turned over to the U.S. military in Afghanistan and held at a prison at Bagram air force base outside Kabul.
Two months later he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where Reprieve said he was subjected to a range of abuses, including being kept tightly shackled to the ground in a hunched position for hours on end and subjected to loud music and strobe lights.
The U.S. government had accused Gharani of staying in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, of fighting in the battle of Tora Bora, serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives, and being a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell.
But the government failed to prove any of the allegations in court and U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled in January that Gharani should be freed. Most of the accusations were based on unreliable information given by other detainees at Guantanamo.